Here are 30 suggestions for how you and your colleagues can use e-mail more carefully and cope with the rising tide of it more effectively.
Train members of the department on e-mail effectiveness (See my post of July 20, 2007: Capital One.).
When you start to type the name of someone in the “To” line, prior names beginning with the same letters may pop up. Make sure you don’t accidentally choose the wrong name.
A recent post here pointed out that advice to take five or ten minutes to stress test an important email would necessarily reduce productivity (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009: 5-10 minute rule for email.). A fellow blogger, Mary Abraham, who writes about knowledge management and lawyers on her blog above and beyond km, disagreed with what she took to be my intent: to discourage email review before sending. She focused on the meaning of “productivity” as doing the right things well, not merely doing lots of things.
I do not advocate shooting off emails without thought. I do argue for in-house counsel getting their work done. Practicing law has an irreducible component of risk, if by risk we mean potential for a bad result following an action. Any advice of an attorney, any decision on what and how to draft an agreement, any legal research and conclusion drawn from it, any series of questions to collect the facts, any email message, can be done inexpertly or counseled unwisely – especially in retrospect. Risk lives in the intersection of email and productivity, however you define it
Hence, to caution a lawyer to “watch out,” to “look before you leap and press send,” and to “think how your email jottings could look to a dubious jury,” is to trouble the confident if not hamstring the risk averse.
It seems perverse to slow down an in-house attorney who is deluged with email, but that is what authors in Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel(Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 2 at §2:18, recommends. For important messages, write co-authors Charles Gill, Joseph Santos and Curtiss Isler, “Use the five- or 10-minute rule (i.e., don’t send the e-mail until you have thought about it for five or 10 minutes).” They mean you should let the message you are about to fire off ruminate a bit; give some thought to how it might look blown up as a trial exhibit; listen to it with adversarial ears. A revision or two might greatly strengthen your side somewhere down the road.
Good advice, very lawyerly, impossible to criticize, but it will obviously hobble productivity. To advise in-house counsel to ponder the legal consequences of what they do with email – indeed, with everything they do – is to be on the side of the angels, but let productivity go to the devil.
By guest author Steven Levy
There is increasing evidence that having dual monitors generates huge productivity gains. If you have a laptop, you’re already set for dual monitors. You’ve got your new widescreen beauty; your laptop screen becomes the second monitor.
For many Windows laptops, simply attaching the new monitor brings up a screen asking you what you want to do with it – have it show the same thing as the laptop, or “extend your desktop” onto the new monitor. Choose the latter. If the dialog doesn’t appear, right-click on the Windows desktop (the screen when you have no application running) and select Graphics Properties; you’ll see a choice with some variant of “extended desktop.”
Law Department Management Blog welcomes guest blogger Steven Levy. For a number of years, Steven was the Senior Director, Information Systems Department, Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs.
You can dramatically improve your computer-time productivity with a simple – and increasingly inexpensive – device. Of course, you may have to beg IT for it – because it may make them jealous.
For under $350 at an office supply chain, you can get a 24” monitor with 1920×1200 resolution. If you only want to spend half that, you can get a 20” widescreen monitor with 1600×900 resolution. For comparison, a standard 17” monitor has 1280×1024 resolution. Your IT liaison or department administrative assistant will know what these numbers mean.
Included in this overview are metaposts and comments that have to do with process improvement. It includes two metaposts on Six Sigma, as well as one each on process mapping, kaizen and cycle time (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references; July 24, 2009: Six Sigma in law departments and the firms they use with 11 references and 1 metapost; April 9, 2009 #2: process maps with 6 references; May 15, 2009: kaizen and continuous improvement with 6 references and one metapost; and March 5, 2008: cycle time with 18 references.).
Other posts have added ideas (See my post of March 23, 2006: poka-yoke or mistake-proofing; April 9, 2009: takt time; and July 14, 2009: Toyota’s A3 technique.).
The authors of a chapter in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 104, wanted to operationalize quality for the law firms they were studying. To operationalize is to devise a metric that represents some soft attribute (See my post of Dec. 9, 2005: operationalize client-satisfaction questions and write them unambiguously.), such as law firm quality.
They measured what percentage of the firm’s partners received their JD from one of the country’s top eight US law schools (Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Univ. of Chicago, Univ. of Michigan and Yale). The higher percentage of elite graduates, the higher the presumed quality (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005: percentages in departments of graduates of elite law schools.).
If we had data from a collection of law departments on the percentage of their lawyers who graduated from one of those eight schools, we might expect to find correlations. For example, might those departments have fewer lawyers per billion? Might their total legal spend per revenue be lower than departments less endowed with elite graduates? Might their structures be flatter? Would they use a different mix of law firms?
A recent post invited readers to send me examples of good management. Dan Williams at T-Mobile obliged, and I thank him. He gave me permission to quote and cite him.
“I have an example that has stuck with me throughout my career. My first general counsel wouldn’t even entertain a meeting request unless it was accompanied by an agenda. Then, he’d review the agenda and decide whether it was worth his time to attend or simply deal with the issue via popping into the person’s office, calling them, or later, e-mailing them. This practice was coupled with open door time that he kept because he minimized his meetings. As I’ve progressed through my career, his time management technique has stayed with me as a glorious goal that I’m still trying to master.”
Agendas drive meetings, but this different use of them makes much sense.
Groupthink: Group members can collectively – and often unconsciously – pressure dissidents to agree to a position the majority favors. According to James Dunning’s recent comment “’Groupthink,’ as it is known in less eminent circles, can literally be lethal – the Columbia space shuttle disaster but one awful example. Dunning applies the notion to the legal context (See my post of Jan. 15, 2006: groupthink.).
False consensus: when people in a group, especially the leader, believe – erroneously – that members feel the same way they do about values (See my post of July 14, 2009: the false consensus illusion.).
Chill: when the dominance of one member – often the general counsel or ranking lawyer – quells contrary thoughts or difficult questions that members might raise (See my post of Feb. 1, 2006: how to reduce the chilling effect.).
The cliché “doing more with less” implies spending more time on work that benefits clients, less on things that help the legal department run, i.e., administrative tasks. Whatever detracts from client service has lower value (See my post of May 20, 2009: estimates of non-chargeable time; Oct. 30, 2005: in-house counsel resent administrative demands; and May 21, 2009: suggested revision to 1,850 standard for chargeable hours.).
What kinds of activities do in-house attorneys get caught up in that are low value to clients, infrastructure maintenance, not “chargeable” (See my post of May 21, 2009: internal chargeable hours with 12 references.)?
? The following 15 candidates came to mind, nearly all of which have a metapost.
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